Sunday, 14 May 2017

Sunday

Continuing my ‘back from the dead’ theme.

I went into work today - arrived at roughly 9am - eventually someone else came in to escape his whole family having norovirus. By about 1pm I’d decided I’d had enough and came home, then fell asleep for a couple of hours (I said I was run down). One of the things I had to do was start looking through the paperwork to move mortgages. I’d totally forgotten that I needed a passport or driving license. I have neither - and no credit cards. I was given a link to perform a personal credit check - it was scary how much they seemed to know about me (which was admittedly almost nothing - there isn’t much to know) so it came out as fairly average to ‘ok’. The whole process is really stressing me out. I used to be OK about things like this but now, post accident , I find myself really struggling with numbers and getting very intimidated by things that are not visual or out of my control. This evening I’m struggling to get my head around anything so I’m watching a film in the background. I have a meeting tomorrow with a client and I need him to be more structured - that’s going to be a fun conversation. I’m also hoping to get approval on stage 1 of something so that I can invoice for what I’ve already done - and need feedback from a client who ‘forgets’ to email. I also need to have a difficult conversation with a supplier who isn’t pulling their weight.

We have a couple of quite big gigs at The Printworks next week as the start of a live music season and on Sunday a local activist is holding a cross party all dayer to encourage people to get registered to vote, so it’s a busy time. Here’s the poster.

Additionally (and I SWEAR this will be the last feeble I ever do) I’ve done some work for Nicholas Wilson - who you may know as the whistleblower who exposed HSBC and a number of other financial institutions for fraud and other practices - he’s spent over a decade dealing with them at great cost to himself and is standing as an independent in the elections for Hastings and Rye against Amber Rudd. I’ve given him some advice on presentation and branded him - I’ll be doing his official election poster and leaflet too, I won’t vote for him - hardly anyone will - but he can seriously erode the Rudd vote if he gets the chance to make his case. Not everyone gets that and I honestly don’t care. He’s standing on the ‘ethical’ ticket - and I’m OK with that.

He insisted on my using his hat. Some people are funny like that

A bit about De Lange

Simon de Lange (not his real name - he made that up on a whim, even he didn’t know what it meant) was the friend who died about 10 days ago. He was 5 years older than me and originally from Hackney. He was a ‘character’ and had probably had far too much of the wrong kind of fun in 80’s London. Resulting in a spell in the Priory. He was able to replace his dependence on illegal pharmaceuticals later on by falling off a ladder and breaking his neck, leading to a lifetime dependence on morphine patches, made worse by an MRSI infection to the spinal column picked up in the local hospital. Over the last few years he had steadily declined - surviving on ice cream and red wine. He was a grafter, and a grifter. One time when I had a stall at a posh jumble he bought several items and I watched with some amusement as he slowly left the hall - and managed to sell everything he’d just bought for a profit to people entering. A few years ago he was on The Antiques Roadshow - he’s bought a large cache of revolutionary street posters in Cuba and wanted them valued. The expert was delighted by them and considered them quite valuable. So he sold them, only to be informed that they were contemporary copies - which lead to much grief and conflict locally - despite the BBC writing an earnest letter of apology to absolve him of anything underhand. When he died, his best friend from London was searching the flat to find his legendary strongbox and came across two loaded AK47’s under the bed that he was ‘looking after for a friend’ - the police were called and eventually declared them fakes - something that might have disappointed Simon. At one time he set himself up as a builder, restoring old houses and had a short career inflicting immense and irreparable damage to a string of listed buildings across the south coast. I don’t think he ever paid any of the fines. My favourite anecdote is about his complete horror of any kind of technology. When he bought an iPhone he find himself unable to use it, so whenever he wanted to post anything on Facebook - he’d wander back to the phone shop and demand that the staff post for him. Almost all his digital correspondence was a string of meaningless and disassociated emoticons. (A flower, an aubergine, two smiley faces and a kitten etc). He had apparently been dead for several days and was found by a friend who had been asked to investigate the smell. The cause of death was pneumonia. He was in appallingly bad physical shape but was still regularly requested to go to ATOS meetings to confirm that yes, having a broken neck - an untreatable spinal infection and the highest tolerance to opiates the hospital had ever seen were reason enough to be ‘on the sick’. In a way - he has been spared a much worse fate as the damage to his spine was slowly robbing him of the use of his hands and feet and would continue until he wouldn’t have ben able to look after himself. He was funny, very random and very kind - and I liked him a lot.PS - and I know it does seem that all I get to talk about these days is death - but as you may recall - my oldest friend died last year of Sarcoma - I have done a bit of design work with the charity Sarcoma UK and helped them with their 'big picnic' concept - the link is here - it would be fantastic if you could get involved in any way.